End of the Road: Downhill Drive, Vicksburg, Mississippi

Downhill Drive is another one of Vicksburg's mystery streets.  It even has conflicting names in the various online map databases. It is a steep road that drops precipitously from Fort Hill Drive down to the west. I think the correct name is Downhill Drive, but it may also be Lower Fort Hill Drive or Elizabeth Street.

Drive down the hill (first gear for engine braking!) and you enter a forest with birds everywhere. It feels like you are far from anything except when a truck rumbles along just below on North Washington Street.


There are only a few cottages here, possibly 1940s-vintage. The blue one was deserted.  The previous resident owned a collection of electric trains and the plywood-mounted layout was in the porch along with a lot of equipment.


A nice lady came out of one of the houses while I was photographing and said she had owned the Chrysler since new. She might entertain an offer to sell it.

All photograph taken with a Sony DSC-R1 digital camera, tripod-mounted.

The end of the road: Short Sherman Avenue, Vicksburg, MS

As I have noted before, Vicksburg has a number of dead-end roads that few people visit. One of these is Short Sherman Avenue, which loops south from Sherman Avenue and stops at a former entrance to the Vicksburg Military Park. Once this road extended to Sherman Loop in the Park, but it has obviously been closed for years. If you hike the Al Scheller Boy Scout trail, you walk along the former roadway, now badly gullied.


There is not much here, just a few cottages, an old pig-breeding barn, and this rusting Chevrolet truck. Every year I see it getting progressively more covered with vines. Soon it will be engulfed with the creeping brush.


Here is an oddity: down in a gully is a surprising well-preserved Rexall Drug sign from Rose Drug. The paint must have been amazingly good quality because the colors are still vivid. A friend and I considered recovering the sign, but it is on Military Park property, meaning it is an archaeological artifact and therefore illegal to remove.

Digital images are from a Fuji F31fd compact digital camera.

UPDATE MARCH 2020: The sign is gone. A lady in a nearby house said some guys from a company that sells old stuff came and removed the sign.

The Mississippi Delta 7: Boyle

Let us move further north into the Mississippi Delta. Unfortunately, I did not have time to explore Cleveland, which is the county seat of Bolivar County and home of Delta State University. But just south of Cleveland on Hwy 61 is the town of Boyle. Most motorists probably rush on through, but two sites caught my eye.


First was this lonely cemetery on the east side of the highway just south of town. There was no church on the site. Notice the skilfully-carved tombstone for a Miss Annie Gade, died Jan. 4, 1883, aged 2 Yrs. 3 Mos. & 20 Days. We forget what a terrible toll childhood diseases took on our ancestors. Never let anyone tell you we should go back to an era of simpler medicine without modern diagnostic equipment, sterilization of instruments, and, especially, inoculations against common diseases.


Further north, a more cheerful scene: this is the Daspot store where you can buy sunglasses and ladies' fashions. The proprietor was very cheerful when I asked permission to photograph the models.  The customers seemed a bit perplexed.

A profile view if you prefer....

Photographs taken with a Panasonic G1 digital camera.

Demolition of Hangar 3 at the Waterways Experiment Station, Vicksburg, Mississippi

Hangar 3 was one of four aircraft-type hangars acquired by the Waterways Experiment Station (WES) sometime in the late-1940s or early-1950s. When complete, it covered 58,700 square feet. Recall that WES is the research and development laboratory operated by the US Army Corps of Engineers in Vicksburg, Misissippi. After World War II, a lot of surplus military equipment and infrastructure was available, and I assume WES acquired these hangars from the Army Air Force or equivalent for free or at low cost.
Two of the hangars were used as shelters to cover hydraulic models. Hangar 3 was transferred to the Coastal Engineering Research Center (CERC) in 1983. CERC has now been incorporated into the Coastal and Hydraulics Laboratory (CHL). As the years go by, fewer and fewer physical hydraulic models are used due to high construction cost, water use, and time. Therefore, there is no need for some of the hangar space.
Not much is left in this interior photograph. But you can see why a hangar is a brilliant design: the strong arch allows a vast floor space to exist without the need for central pillars or supports. I assume originally these hangars could be lengthened as needed by simply adding more arch girders and roof panels.
The blue woven matting was used for wave dampening in hydraulic models.
The hangars were equipped with serious electrical supply (for pumps) and bright lights. During tests, paper confetti was thrown into the water and photographed with time-lapse photography. The cameras were mounted on walkways suspended way above the models.
It does not take long for a commercial demolition crew to tear down the metal panels with a cutting machine. So sad...

April 9, 2012 update: My wife informed me that the roof is totally down.

All photographs taken with a Fuji F31fd compact digital camera.

June 2015 update: Hangar 4 has also been demolished to make way for the new headquarters building.

The Mississippi Delta 6: Leland

Leland is a town on U.S. Highway 61 (the Blues Highway) in Washington County, Mississippi. It is an agricultural center with soybeans, cotton, and catfish as its main commodities. Like many Delta towns, it looks like it was much more prosperous 20 or more years ago and is now sleeping in old age.

According to Wikipedia:

"Leland is in the heart of blues country and has produced a number of national and regionally famous blues musicians. Highway 61, mentioned in numerous blues recordings, runs through the town and gives its name to the community's blues museum. Leland is the burial place of the folk artist and blues musician James "Son" Thomas, who lived for many years along the railroad tracks. Thomas is buried beneath a gravestone donated by musician John Fogerty of Creedence Clearwater Revival.

Blues musician Johnny Winter was born in Leland on Feb. 23, 1944, to an Army officer and his wife. Winter is commemmorated on a plaque in the community that is part of the Mississippi Blues Trail.

The community is the birthplace of Kermit the Frog, a Muppet created by Jim Henson, who was born in nearby Greenville. The city has a museum along the banks of Deer Creek celebrating Henson's accomplishments."

Deer Creek runs through town, and some of the magnificent mansions attest to the wealth associated with agriculture in the past. These two are on North and South Deer Creek Drive, west of downtown.

Proceed downtown and you see where a cotton mill was once located. Most of the works have been demolished.



The tracks from the Yazoo and Mississippi Valley Railroad (later part of the Illinois Central) once ran north-south through the center of the Delta, but they were removed in the early 1980s. This was standard gauge 4 ft 8 1⁄2 in (1,435 mm) track. The Msrailroads web page has more information about historic Mississippi railroads. The post card from the John Sharp collection is courtesy of Msrailroads (Thanks!)

This is a June 1937 photograph of a cinema in Leland by Dorothea Lange, from the Library of Congress.

Proceed north on Main Street, and many of the shops and the former hotel are closed. As of 2000, this seed store was still in business.

I am not sure of the status of this elevator complex on North Main Street.

Out in the flat country near Dunleith, I photographed this classic little MB church in 2000. This was Mount Elm MB Church, and it was way out in the country, with no homes anywhere nearby.

Photograph note: the church and the feed store are scans of Kodachrome 25 slide film. I took the photographs with a 1949-vintage Leica IIIC rangefinder camera with 50 mm f/2.0 Summitar lens and a polarizer filter. The Summitar was a pre-WWII design and capable of superb results, especially if stopped down to f/4 or smaller. Hint: always use a tripod when photographing architecture. Your subject won't run away from you.

Dec. 2017 update: The Leica IIIC has been repaired and put back into operation (click the link).

More Cottages on Pearl Street, Vicksburg

Some of you readers may remember my 2010 post on historic Pearl Street, in Vicksburg, Mississippi. As I wrote then, many of the early-20th century houses had been or were in the process of being torn down. Here are some more examples of architecture along that road (from my 2006 files).

This is No. 2114 Pearl. Notice the sun awnings running along the entire front. The siding is a type of asphalt tile patterned to look like stone blocks. I recall these were common in the mid-20th century, durable and providing some degree of insulation.

Here is No. 2118, nicely restored with vinyl siding. The Kansas City railroad yard is behind and down the hill.

No. 2123 was a substantial cottage and has been boarded up for years.

This nicely-painted cottage on a landscaped lot is No. 3513 and has a view of the bend of the Mississippi River.

Finally, this handsome cottage at 3607 Pearl. I will look through the archives for more Pearl Street examples.

All photographs taken with a Sony DSC-W7 compact digital camera.

The Mississippi Delta 5: Arcola

This is the fifth post on the Mississippi Delta. This is not the delta of the Mississippi River that protrudes south into the Gulf of Mexico. Rather, when most people refer to "the Delta," they are thinking of the rich alluvial plain that lies between the Mississippi and Yazoo Rivers, with Vicksburg marking its southern limit and Memphis the northern. The map above, from the US Geological Survey (downloaded from Wikipedia), shows the area. The delta has a unique cultural, racial, and economic history. Before the American Civil War, it was one of the richest cotton growing areas in the world and attracted wealthy planters, who imported black slaves to work the plantations.

According to an article in the Vicksburg Post on March 18, 2012, by Terry Rector (Warren County Soil and Water Conservation District), the Mississippi delta soils are among the most productive for agricultural crops in the country. Alluvium is the name given to river-deposited soils, which consist of minerals and materials derived from the hinterlands that form the river's drainage basin. Two common soil types found in the Delta are the Memphis Silt Loam and the Commerce Very Fine Sandy Loam. These were among the easiest for farmers to work and were the first to be converted from forest to cropland two centuries ago. When farmers referred to good Deer Creek soil, they were referring to the sandy loam soils along much of Deer Creek.

Times have changed and the Delta is now economically in very rough condition. In the late-1920s (following the great 1927 Mississippi River flood) thousands of farm workers left for the North to escape brutality, abject poverty, and racism and seek factory jobs in cities like Chicago and Detroit. Also, mechanization of agriculture, especially mechanical cotton harvesting, eliminated the jobs of thousands of farm workers. According to Wikipedia, "From the late 1930s through the 1950s, the Delta experienced an agriculture boom, as wartime needs followed by reconstruction in Europe expanded the demand for the Delta region’s farm products. As the mechanization of agriculture continued, women continued to leave the fields and go into service work, while the men drove tractors and worked on the farms. From the 1960s through the 1990s, thousands of small farms and dwellings in the Delta region were absorbed by large corporate-owned agribusinesses, and the smallest Delta communities have stagnated." As late as the 1960s, many towns like Rolling Fork, Leland, and Greenville were still active, bustling communities. But now many of these towns are semi-deserted, with empty business strips, collapsing shops, and grim poverty.

The photographs below are from Arcola, a town on Deer Creek north of Hollandale and south of Leland. The railroad once came through here, but the tracks were removed in the 1980s.

Deer Creek Drive is the main strip. All that is left is a gas station/convenience store and several lounges (or dives). Even on a sunny day the strip is depressing.

Here is another lounge. It says a lot that a small town has two drinking spots.

Here is a deserted super market on Martin Luther King Drive.

An architectural oddity: many of the shops on Deer Creek Drive were built out over the banks of the creek on brick pillars, As you can see, the floors have collapsed.

Farm houses once dotted the countryside. But now, many, like this example at 1862 Hwy 438, are deserted.

All photographs taken with Olympus E-330 and Panasonic G1 digital cameras.

Two-Room Schoolhouse, Carpenter, Mississippi

Carpenter, Mississippi, is a small farming community about 4 miles south of Utica, in Copiah County. At the corner of Highway 18 and Dentville Road stands a wood schoolhouse.

According to Preservation in Mississippi, the school dates from 1921 and was built according to State Plan No. 3 N.S. As you can see, it is is poor condition, but 10 years ago, it was reasonably intact.

Like all schools in the pre-air-conditioning and pre-electricity era, it featured large windows to let in the light and air. It must have been cheerful for students to be surrounded by nature, and maybe a bit distracting. Let's see: modern air-conditioned school with high walls that looks like prison architecture versus cheerful cottage with expansive windows and natural light.

If anyone can tell me more about this site, I welcome the information.

(All photgraphs taken with a Panasonic G1 camera with 14-45 mm G Vario f/3.5 lens, tripod-mounted. The map (Figure 1) is from ESRI® ArcMap GIS software.)